Phase Three: Relationships
Discussing your unconscious mind requires counterintuitive thinking…
This is, after all, about a how we find our way in life as organisms.
“Organismic intuition” will always seem familiar to the conscious mind because pure intuition happens naturally..
Organismic is the way you know stuff in your heart’s mind, aside from emotions.
Think how reliable your nonmaterial heart is when it has no emotion.
Feeling in your heart is an automatic response that you cannot control.
I’m a big fan of the comedy series “The Big Bang Theory.” I have gone through all 12 seasons four or five times.
Penny’s earthy wisdom pops out now and then, this time In season 3, episode 5..
In a bit of pillow talk, Penny is telling Leonard how as a child she was in love with the puppet Ernie from Sesame Street.
"The heart wants what the heart wants, Leonard" she says. You know what she means…
Ask yourself “Why?” about something you usually do.
You might have an answer, like what 6-year-old Penny might say she likes about Ernie.
But keep asking why after each answer you have until you reach the key final answer: I don’t know why, I just do. Or, There’s no why, it just is.
If you get to what just IS, you begin to separate between what you experience through the senses and the organism that keeps you alive in the first place - a natural life navigator.
Not knowing why is where pure intuition resides. In the 12 Phases™ blog, we explore the path from pure intuition to where you think and act in your external experience.
When you make choices on the fly, it is without thoughtful deliberation. Upon reflection, you may decide your unthought reaction was keenly tuned in and correct, or it may be good information about your unfiltered tendencies.
I’ve found that why has a lot to do with love and how you move in that love, in relation to anything that is connected to your inexplicable why.
Let's think about today, in terms of how you choose to relate to others.
Today
Were you in a new situation of some kind today? Let's assume you were, simply because change is constant.
Relationships are probably the most intuitively active area of your day-to-day existence. We have our radar out, trying to determine how a relationship will go before we enter into it.
Apply that to the myriad contacts with people that you navigate every day or every week. There is no predicting what will happen between two people in a given situation, even if you know each other well.
The "you" we're concerned with in Phase 3 is your unspoken power to "read the room." The intuitive "you" looks for a safe position for yourself in relation to each person in the situation. This can happen in seconds, or it may take some experience with the person before you get a full feel for the relationship between the two of you.
In the 12 Phases™ sequence, a Phase 1 impact might be unexpectedly finding yourself in an unfamiliar situation. Intuition leads you through it, based on your innate knowledge…
In other words, your navigator takes the wheel to keep your survival and progress on track. This is not a conscious process; it is an automatic function of your organism.
And then in Phase 2, your core priorities rise over the unsettling forces in the situation. This too is purely intuitive, drawing on a lifetime of building priorities out of what works for you in life.
So, as intuition continues forward aligned with your priorities, it looks out into the unfamiliar situation again.
In Phase 3, your intuition is feeling for safety. It scouts this new territory looking for space among others that is available to you.
Reconnoiter is a good word for what's going on…
In the military, scoping the scene and making a strategy before taking action is necessary to avoid obvious pitfalls or possible roadblocks to a plan.
An unexpected situation has consequences that may affect your life, whether temporarily or permanently. Your survival instinct takes a view toward the scene, looking for a kind of home base where you can manage your responses.
Some of us choose safety first, avoid getting involved, and stay close to what we know and can control firsthand.
This is Phase 3: your perception of safety among others with regard to this particular disruption. It is a preliminary to actually securing that home base in Phase 4.
All of this is going on in your subconscious, a workshop on the way to conscious intention.
Just imagine – your five senses are swamped with input from eyes and ears, the information changes, and you make choices on the fly.
Your organism is developing as a unit, body and mind, every minute of every day, keeping you upright and moving forward, kind of like a tightrope walker.
The sense that guides your intuition – the nonconscious function of your organism – has to do with you as an autonomous individual.
Maybe it sticks to your DNA…
In an unfamiliar situation, you still must move, do things, relate to people on the fly, and also keep your radar up for other unexpected consequences.
Your intuitive response will come directly from the greater information available in your unconscious mind.
Pure intuition is different from the kind of intuition built from a steady level of life experience—what you subconsciously feel as normal for you.
Some examples:
- Women’s intuition is thought of as hypersensitivity to how people feel and how they relate to others, as individuals and in groups.
- When you work on software at work, the longer you work the same program, the greater your intuition becomes about what you can do with it. The boundaries are in the software but the way you use it could be different from your coworkers’ way - which can translate into skill levels.
- Programmers must be intuitive about how computers “think” so they can write strings of code that merge with other strings.
There’s a lot of abstract thinking going on in all types of intuition; we visualize a reality separate from physical things and people.
My Phase 3 experience
On this particular day, my norm has a disruption that involves family—not because of an external event, but because I am having an awakening.
It dawns on me that so many of my choices during my life involving family members were often side decisions, not directly part of my personal agenda for life.
My connection to each person in my original family and to my children and grandchildren has an emotional texture woven from years of managing on the fly.
The impact on me is powerful as I realize that the sum of that history is now an overarching reality that requires a response from me, one I am not yet ready to act on.
With marriages and children multiplying, there are too many people in my near and extended family for me to know them beyond passing acquaintance. So, to ensure my own safety I have confined relationships to those carefully built over time.
But because my priority of acceptance and respect for individuals according to their distinct life paths is expanding, family has come around as a focus rather than something in the background.
For me to evaluate each relationship as I have been, trying to make a plan that respects my autonomy and also considers the effect of my response on them – this is too huge, too overwhelming for my conscious reasoning.
Instead, I find myself feeling for a safe place, one where I can honor myself and my highest priorities while engaging in relationships as a whole.
Meanwhile, my organism sorts it all correctly faster than AI, and bit by bit, I will begin to "see" my place of autonomy among them all.
Phase 3 is figuring out a "home base" for me, a position among the vast ocean of unknowns, a place from which I can honestly approach each relationship with freedom through integrity, strength, and acceptance.
The details in your experience may be completely different, but the principle is the same:
Your organism is, by Nature, taking care of many things for you without your notice, working through disruption and restoring stability phase by phase.
A safe space among others
Physical space:
The Earth is the physical reality: the space occupied by all organisms, living and nonliving. Your place in that space is identified by the physical coordinates of the space you occupy.
GPS (the Global Positioning System) can describe you by your physical position using global coordinates of latitude and longitude, relative to the prime meridian - "0" by the clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.
We occupy a space among others in two ways: physically and psychologically. Both are autonomous - you have a GPS position and you have a perspective outwardly that is yours alone.
Your mind is yours; my mind is mine.
Biological homeostasis, where everything works as it is supposed to, is defined as a state of optimal function in any living organism.
Maintaining homeostasis in the human organism is much more complex than the basic involuntary operations of your biological organs. Heart, lungs, digestive processes, hormonal urges. etc. operate entirely on their own without your conscious involvement.
When the communication between body, brain, and mind is also folded in, homeostasis is the comfortable harmony among the physical, mental, and emotional realms. The consequence of this harmony is free thought and creativity.
Going further in the integrated function of our organism, the twelve phases phenomenon shows how individual organisms - you or me - are the fibers of human evolution.
Just exactly how do humans survive?
The 12 Phases™, in effect, places humanity under a microscope to see how the individual, as a microorganism, exists in its own ecosystem.
It is completely understandable why studying the individual is beyond the ability - and interest - of current scientific research.
But you understanding yourself, or me understanding myself and you, would be immensely helpful for human progress.
So, whether or not science is interested, I cannot contain my curiosity about what I observe as the independent movement of my own organism.
Purpose and meaning are critical to the perpetuation of humans as a species, and we find the origins of purpose and meaning in the individual experience.
Securing a space in which you can be productive in your own way is how creativity happens.
If the homeostatic imperative is the ceaseless "upregulating" nature of survival, as neurologist Antonio Damasio asserts, an organism must not only survive, it must also advance by selecting benefits from its environment.
Cultures are made, he says, when we address pain and discomfort to reduce or eliminate them through what we create.
An entire agenda...
Humanity has made great strides forward, even into space. But in the microspace of the creative individual is where advancements begin - a space current science cannot yet examine with precision.
The twelve phases phenomenon is the sequence - person by person - between your organism and the next innovation. It is the ecosystem of the individual and how each survives; if not an evolution, it is at least an epigenesis in each organism.
In a nutshell, contentment has us at zero; everything is good, no needs to address.
The moment a disruption occurs from the environment outside your control, your organism's job is to overcome this aberration by moving away from pain and discomfort toward new solutions.
I call the whole mechanism "the heart's mind" because there is clearly an agenda at work for my good that I cannot initiate, guide, or influence with my conscious intention. I can only recognize it and cooperate with it.
The journey back to contentment is measured in the 12 Phases™.
The first six phases follow the return to autonomous navigation, with the addition of some new strength gained in the effort.
In the second six phases, the expansion of your abilities is recognized and acquired in the formation of culture where others benefit.
I must emphasize again that it is your organism, operating apart from your conscious intention, that has the power to maintain and improve the condition of your life.
Trauma can set you back but your organism never ceases to work in your favor, to bring you to the highest capacity of productivity and happiness available to you.
The heart's mind is the logic I must portray here. Not the heart's emotion, as you probably conceive of as heart, but the embodiment of your truest self and the way it navigates as a maturing individual.
I trust in your human ability to feel what I mean in the core of your being.
Sometimes I wonder - Is what I'm attempting even possible?
But this I know:
I respect your life as the process of your maturation from birth, same as mine.
I respect your history as a portrait of your life cycle, according to the way your DNA preserves itself.
I respect your ability to judge your circumstances according to your innate priorities that develop out of your life experience. Your choices, your consequences.
Keywords in the 12 Phases™:
Phase 1: Impact/Intuition
Phase 2: Recovery/Priorities
Phase 3: Position/Relate
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Referenced in this blog:
Books by leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, especially The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.
The Big Bang Theory, season 3 episode 5.
The Heart’s Mind: How Unconscious Responses in Life and Work Naturally Improve Our Lives While We Make Other Plans by Elizabeth Diane.